The roots of the 2008 financial crisis are often traced back to the collapse of the housing bubble. The factors that precipitated the crisis, and propagated its effects on firms and consumers to produce an economic contraction, are still the subject of ongoing debate among academics, policy...

This dissertation addresses issues concerning liquidity and its volatility. It consists of two essays. The first essay, "Liquidity, Macro Factors and the U.S. Equity Flows to Emerging Markets", examines the role of liquidity on equity flows from the U.S. to fifteen emerging markets around the...

This paper examines pricing in the market for depositary receipts, securities designed to track the performance of a stock index that trade like shares of stock. Arbitrage costs are low because these assets have low fundamental risk, low transactions costs, and high dividend yields. We find that...

The most important factor that affects the decision making process in finance is the risk which is usually measured by variance (total risk) or systematic risk (beta). Since investors' sentiment (whether she is an optimist or pessimist) plays a very important role in the choice of beta measure,...

This thesis addresses asset pricing in Chinese A-share stock markets using a dataset consisting of all shares listed in Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges from January 1997 to December 2007. The empirical work is carried out based on two theoretical foundations: the efficient market...

Since the start of the financial crisis, various forms of securitization have been criticized for causing the problems experienced. The amount of Asset Backed Commercial Paper outstanding fell drastically in the middle of 2007 drawing our attention to this market. Our study focuses on the use of...

The availability of a unique data set of financially distressed firms enabled this study to apply the dynamic capital structure adjustment model to a study of capital structure. In addition, the factors driving capital structure adjustment of financially distressed and of healthy firms were...

Emergence of crisis in financial markets, especially banks, have forced a change in approach to riskmanagement. It has become necessary to develop new or refine existing models of early bankruptcythreat warning, as well as establishing the potential impact of bank failures. One of the tools,...

This paper builds a general test of contagion in financial markets based on bivariate correlation analysis – a test that can be interpreted as an extension of the normal correlation theorem. Contagion is defined as a structural break in the data generating process of rates of return. Using a...

The paper measures the U.S. Farm Credit System’s technical efficiency from 2000 to 2009 using a stochastic frontier production function model with quarterly unbalanced panel data. The paper's results suggest that the FCS has not efficiently utilized their inputs. On an average, the system...